One night in Berlin, 1943, during an SS raid, a German Cabaret singer opens her door to save a Jewish Resistance fighter. As the hours unfold, destiny winds their lives more tightly together until there is no turning back. When Yellow Were the Stars on Earth tells a story of two rarely written about realities: Jewish female fighters and Germans who died refusing to be part of Nazi machinery. Amidst the atrocities of WWII, these women transcend enemy lines and, in their final moments, make an ultimate sacrifice for love.

The tragedy of the Holocaust is written in indelible ink on our past. It has left a deep scar on our history and is profoundly connected to another subject that has little been dealt with; the considerable number of people who died opposing the horrors of the Nazi machine. Most of them are not remembered as heroes and their stories were never known; they’ve just been forgotten, swallowed by time. When Yellow Were the Stars on Earth was written out of a personal wish to create an imaginary place in time and space where, for once, a German Jew (Miriam) and a German (Klara) could meet, look at each other beyond the tragedies that linked them during WWII, and express the primal love that is common to all souls.

The Cast

Director – Franco Moschetti

Michele Farbman - Miriam

Gudrun Buhler - Klara

Curtis Nielson – Gunter

John Larkin – Joseph

Matt McAllister - Herman

Marcello Padilla – Hans

Kazy Tauginas - Fritz

Franco Moschetti- Wolfgang

Wanda O’Connell – Eva

Rhea Ross – Ann

The Crew

Tech Director and light designer – Patrick Bakalli

Franco Moschetti Writer/Director

Franco Moschetti is a playwright and director of theater and film. He is the founder and Artistic Director of The Cabrini Repertory Theater, and creator of the Thespis and Venus/Adonis Theater Festival/Competitions. His recent work includes writing and directing War Is Over, a short film denouncing war, that was screened in Rome, Milan, Ghent, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Ottawa, New York, San Diego and Las Vegas.

He also wrote and directed It Was A Girl, a short film that raised awareness about the controversial tragedy of abortion. It was screened at New York Film Academy in New York. In 2012, he directed and co-wrote with Michele Farbman That is How I Left (thatishowileft.com), a powerful biographical play staged at the Living Theater to critical acclaim. Franco is currently writing a film adaptation of When Yellow Were the Stars on Earth.

Letter from the Writer/Director Franco Moschetti

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to become familiar with a play I’ve written.

When Yellow Were the Stars on Earth

The play takes place in Berlin in 1943 and explores two areas of WWII phenomena that are rarely spoken of. To my knowledge, a play that deals with female Jewish Resistance fighters and Germans who oppose the Nazi Regime enough to die for their beliefs has never been written. The story centers on two such characters, both women.

The Jewish Resistance fighter is a German that risks her life every day to defeat the Nazi machinery responsible for killing so many members of her race, including her husband and the second German woman is a Cabaret singer who, while trapped in a relationship with a brutal SS Captain, sheds secret tears of pain knowing that her fellow countrymen are murdering millions in Forests shootings in Germany occupied countries, most of them Jews. It would have been a rare moment in time for these two women to meet.

I have been immersed in studying Holocaust phenomena for many years and continue to be deeply pained by the killing of 12 millions people of which 6 million Jews. I have collected a large number of documentaries from around the world and many books that report in detail on the long journey of despair that Jewish European citizens endured. It’s no coincidence that my closest friends are Jewish. Although I am Italian and was raised Catholic, my empathy runs so deep that I feel I am a member of the Jewish race. I’ve also thoroughly studied the history of Germany from the beginning of the 20th Century until the 1960s. I and many others have always been startled by how German citizens were completely seduced by Hitler and forced into events created by the Führer and his fellow aids. The question of questions asked so many times before is how could a group of people like the Germans, so refined and evolved, masters in so many fields of art and, above all, lovers of the intimate essence of nature, be drawn into the dark events of WWII?

What many don’t know is that a considerable number of Germans died opposing the horrors of the Nazi machine. They are not remembered as heroes.

My play was written out of a personal wish to create an imaginary place in time when, for once, a German (Klara) and a German Jew (Miriam) could meet, look at each other beyond their ethnic imprint and the tragedy that linked them during WWII, and find the primal love that is common to all souls.

Klara dies under interrogation in an SS station for hiding and not revealing the whereabouts of Miriam, the resistance fighter she sheltered in her apartment for just a few hours. Miriam, in turn, dies while attempting to liberate Klara from the grip of the SS that tortured and killed her. By the end of the play, it is apparent that the good and heroic nature of the German tradition is at its best in Klara and Miriam who would rather lose her life than be party to the Nazi regime, and the transcendent heroism is equally alive in both, whom are ready to love one of their “enemies” and die knowing that to attempt to save them is equal to a suicide verdict.